Word: gaines
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...there is a deeper question--one that has plagued anyone who has ever struggled to take off more than a few pounds. And that is: How do some folks manage to live in the same "toxic environment" and never gain weight? Indeed, the question of why so many of us are fat is just half the puzzle. "You can just as easily flip it around," says Jeffrey Friedman, a molecular geneticist at Rockefeller University, "and ask why--despite equal access to calories--is anyone thin...
...Center in Boston last month pinpointed three genes that may account for at least some of that variation. Mice that lack the genes, they reported in Science, grow grossly obese when fed a high-calorie diet enriched with fat and sucrose. By contrast, normal mice fed the same diet gain very modest amounts of weight...
...fashion, they create a reservoir of fat that comes in handy when food grows scarce. It's easy to imagine that repeated famines over the course of human development practically forced the biological system for regulating weight to skew strongly toward resisting weight loss rather than protecting against weight gain...
...which exercises an influence on appetite and thermogenesis, is thought to be key to maintaining this balance. For as we layer on fat, we pump out more leptin, which signals the hypothalamus that it's time to accelerate energy output and brake caloric intake. The problem is, people who gain weight have now been shown to develop a remarkable resistance to leptin's power. The fatter they get, and the more leptin they make, the more impervious the hypothalamus becomes. Eventually the hypothalamus interprets the elevated level of leptin as normal--and forever after misreads the drops in leptin caused...
...digestive system play a role, but also researchers are learning that they must account for the influence of such mood-altering neurotransmitters as dopamine and serotonin, as well as the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. And then there are melanocortins, brain chemicals whose power to affect weight loss and gain is just now coming into focus...